Bid Balancing and How It Works

This article explains what bid balancing means in Stimaro — why your bid total and your marked-up target can drift apart, what Auto-Balance does about it, and what to watch for. For the bid validation checks that flag an unbalanced bid, see Using the Validation feature.

Two numbers that should match — but sometimes don't

When you price a bid, there are really two totals in play:

Your balanced bid is what the math says the bid should total — your direct costs plus every markup layer (category markup, overhead, profit, bond) applied cleanly on top. It's the target number your markup settings produce.

Your actual bid is what your bid rows actually add up to — the sum of each line's bid quantity times its bid unit price.

In a perfectly clean bid, these are identical. But they drift apart whenever you adjust individual line prices by hand. Round a unit price to a cleaner number, nudge a line up or down for strategy, override a price on one item — each small manual change moves the actual bid away from the balanced target. The gap between them is what "unbalanced" means.

Why the gap matters

A small gap isn't necessarily wrong — sometimes you want specific line prices for strategic reasons, and you're accepting that the rows won't sum exactly to the formula's number. But an unintended gap is a problem: it means your bid isn't actually carrying the markup you think it is. If your actual bid has drifted below your balanced target, you're leaving money on the table — your overhead and profit aren't fully covered, even though your markup settings say they should be. Stimaro's validation flags this so a drift doesn't slip through to submission unnoticed.

What Auto-Balance does

Auto-Balance — the scale icon (⚖) in the bid toolbar, labeled Auto-balance bid units on hover — reconciles the two numbers. It adjusts your bid unit prices so the rows add back up to the balanced target — distributing the markup across your line items so the actual bid matches what your markup settings intend. In one step, it takes a bid that has drifted out of alignment and brings the line prices back into agreement with the formula.

This is what lets you work the way estimators actually work: build up your costs, set your markup, then adjust individual lines as needed — and when you're done fiddling, balance it back to a clean, internally consistent number.

The sequence that matters: Simulator before Auto-Balance

There's one ordering rule worth burning into memory, because getting it backwards produces a confusing result:

Set your markup first (including any Simulator changes), then Auto-Balance — not the other way around.

If you Auto-Balance first and then raise your markup targets, your balanced target moves after the rows were already reconciled to the old, lower target. The result is a large gap in the wrong direction — the bid can show a big negative variance (a "Windfall P/L" deep in the red), making a perfectly good bid look severely underpriced. It's not actually broken; the numbers are just out of order. But it's alarming and easy to misread.

So the reliable workflow is: build your costs, set and simulate your markup until you're happy with it, then run Auto-Balance to bring the lines into line with that final markup. If you change markup again afterward, balance again.

How balancing relates to validation

The Validation feature includes a structural check for an unbalanced bid — it compares your actual bid against the balanced target and flags a gap beyond a tiny rounding tolerance. When you see that warning, it's telling you the two numbers have drifted. The usual fix is to run Auto-Balance (after confirming your markup is final), or to review any manual price overrides you made on purpose and decide whether to keep them. A clean, validated bid is one where the actual and balanced totals agree, or where any remaining gap is intentional and understood.

In practice

For most bids, the rhythm is simple: build it, price it, set your markup, Auto-Balance, validate, submit. The balancing concept only demands attention when you've been hand-adjusting line prices — which is exactly when you want a tool that can pull everything back into alignment with one click, and a validation check that warns you if you forgot to.